rebus

The effect of these lines, which reach back into the past while projecting far into the future, is that of a rebus, with the stunning phrase “the final whereabouts” offering one more breath of indirection.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 22, 2022

It reminds me of a surrealist painting, or a rebus puzzle.

From Slate ● Aug. 6, 2021

Follow Plautus’s famous injunction: modus omnibus in rebus.

From New York Times ● Apr. 8, 2016

Mrs. Gordon was credited with pioneering and popularizing the use of the rebus, in which a character represents a word or part of a word.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 31, 2015

Linguists term this decisive innovation, which also underlies puns today, the rebus principle.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond

I grew up doing crosswords, riddles and rebuses.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 28, 2025

Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty Images In essence, Griffiths had to crack an elaborate Tudor code of rebuses, ciphers, heraldic motifs and symbolic flowers to discover who the man was.

From The Guardian ● May 19, 2015

More complex rebuses are pictures whose elements, correctly named and put together, make up words or sentences.

From Time Magazine Archive

I sometimes indulged my fancy in writing verses, or composing rebuses, and my governess never failed to applaud the juvenile compositions I presented to her.

From Beaux and Belles of England Mrs. Mary Robinson, Written by Herself, With the lives of the Duchesses of Gordon and Devonshire by Mary Robinson

He, the seeker after numerical combinations, the solver of amusing problems, the answerer of charades, rebuses, logogryphs, and such things, was at last in his true element.

From Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon by Jules Verne